The Bulls’ DeMar DeRozan and the Hawks’ De’Andre Hunter fight for a ball, as Trae Young looks on, during a game in February.
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Of all the great teams in NBA history, the 1986-87 Seattle SuperSonics definitely weren’t one of them.
You remember those Sonics, don’t you? No?
That’s OK. Nobody else does, either.
But they had Dale Ellis, Tom Chambers, Xavier McDaniel and Nate McMillan — no true superstars, but a decent enough crew — and when playoff time came, they made some noise despite being the Western Conference’s No. 7 seed. They upset the Mavericks three games to one in the first round and got the better of the Rockets four games to two in the West semifinals. Well over their skis by this point, they took on Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s championship-bound Lakers, got swept 4-0 and, well, there you have it. Storytime over.
Why in the world would we be talking about the Sonics of 1987? That’s a good question. We probably shouldn’t be and certainly won’t ever again. Suffice it to say, though, they were the last NBA team to squeeze into the playoffs with a losing record — 39-43 in their case — and win a series.
That’s 37 years, folks. If you don’t believe it, whip out your trusty calculator and have a go.
A whole lot of history is saying the play-in game between the Bulls (39-43) and the Hawks (36-46) — the East’s 9 and 10 seeds, respectively — Wednesday night at the United Center will be a pointless exercise. Common sense is saying quite the same thing. Yes, there will be a winner. Yes, it’s conceivable the winner might stay on a sudden mini-heater and shock the much better Heat or 76ers out of a playoff spot two nights later. Miami has banged-up guys in Jimmy Butler’s supporting cast — Terry Rozier, Kevin Love, Duncan Robinson — and Philadelphia has Joel Embiid’s balky knee to worry about. It’s a stretch, but it could happen.
But after that, best case? The very idea that a Bulls team frozen in borderline irrelevance, let alone a Hawks squad that’s even worse, could then go on and give the top-seeded, 64-win Celtics any sort of difficulty in a best-of-seven series is farcical.
The play-in tournament itself isn’t pointless. In the West, the ninth- and 10th-place teams are the talented Kings and the battle-tested Warriors. It wouldn’t be fun for any team to have to contend with De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis in a best-of-seven series, let alone to have to try to keep Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Chris Paul from doing what they were put together to do. Really, it isn’t that hard to imagine any of the 7-10 teams in the West — the 49-33 Pelicans, the 47-35 Lakers, the 46-36 Kings or the 46-36 Warriors — taking down top-seeded Oklahoma City.
This is an East thing. A Bulls and Hawks thing. Does it honestly make the postseason picture any more compelling whatsoever to have a couple of sub-.500 teams in it?
As LeBron James said in 2018, when the play-in concept was first proposed, “That’s wack. You’ve got to earn your spot to be in the postseason. No consolation for finishing last. That’s corny.”
The definition of “corny” seems to have evolved over the years, but bad is still bad and drama is still better than no drama.
Aside from giving Bulls fans a fleeting thrill, what good would it have done them — to say nothing of NBA fans around the world — if last year’s 40-42 Bulls had finished off their upset bid in Miami in the play-in? The Heat, a winning team led by an A-list star in Butler and an A-list coach in Erik Spoelstra, went on as an 8 seed to topple the Bucks, Knicks and Celtics in an epic run to the Finals. Surely, we all agree the Bulls were — and still are — incapable of pulling off anything close to that level of weeks-long entertainment. They’d have taken one, maybe two rides up I-94 to Milwaukee and, well, there you have it. Storytime over.
An NBA.com headline around this time in 2022 read, “Emotion, drama prove the NBA Play-In Tournament works,” with a subhead boasting that the league was “providing fans and players a Game 7 feel as teams play for their playoff lives.” The story breathlessly described the Timberwolves’ Pat Beverley jumping on a table and the Hawks’ Clint Capela pounding his chest in celebrations of play-in victory. But neither of those teams was a 9 or a 10, and each still got smacked around in the first round.
It was hard enough before the play-in to find the kind of first-round drama that becomes part of NBA lore. Before the Heat beat the Bucks last year, the last 1 seed to lose a first-round series was the 2012 Bulls. And we know the only thing that nonsense was about was a crushing injury to Derrick Rose.
The Bulls and the Hawks will go at it at the UC, and it might be slightly more riveting than one of those NCAA Tournament play-in games in Dayton, Ohio. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Sky first-round picks Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese will appear courtside. It would up the star power in the building, at least.
Competitively speaking, though, a 76ers-Celtics or Heat-Celtics series has actual promise that neither the Bulls nor the Hawks have any business spoiling.
Nearing postseason time in 2021, as his Lakers were dropping into seventh place in the West, James again railed against the play-in.
“Whoever came up with that [expletive] needs to be fired,” he said.
Fired? Nah, that’s way too strong. Just force that person to watch all four games of the 1987 West finals instead. They had to be pretty awful, not that anybody remembers.